Heres my thought process. I was thinking about how the concept of childhood, and by proxy, adulthood, is an artficial social construct that has not existed for most of human history. The fact that we are even able to be children in the first place, and not young adults, for such a long period of time, is a privelleg, a privillege that many young adults in war torn and poor countries do not have. Obviously there will always be stage of life where you are fully dependent on your caretaker, but in the past, once you were capable of providing for society and not just sitting being useless sucking on mommys tit, you would provide for society. There was no lackadaiscal carefree time where you had no responsibilities or consequences except for learning, Espcially not for almost two decades straight. But as society progressed, the need for people to be able to provide for society at young ages became less and less necessary, thus the time where you could be carefree and have no real responisbillties or consequences became longer and longer. That combined the very real possibility of the human life span increasing leads to the very real posibillity that childhood will expand, and drastically at that.
I genuinely wouldnt be suprised if in the not so distance future, childhood were to expand until something like 30. It seems improbable now, for a 29 year old to be a child, but a couple centuries ago, when 10 year olds were young adults, it probably seemed absolutely ridiculous for 17 year olds to be children.
And that got me thinking, why stop at 30? Or 40? Or any other arbitrary number? The traditional markers of adulthood like buying a house and getting a job and getting married and starting a family are already being pushed back farther and farther with each decade that passes and mandatory education requirements are getting stricter and lengthier. In a future society where all are needs are automatically provided for and the human lifespan is extended with scientific advancements, will you ever even need to “grow up” in the first place? Will there even be a need for adulthood? Or in the other direction, a need for childhood, since it will all be the same? Why wouldn't the end goal of society be to live in a permant carefree state of life, where you dont have to make your own descions, be responisble, accountable, or anything else “mature”? Where your life is just exploration and play? If no one needs to be an “adult” then no one will need to be a “child” either, and just like at the beginning of humanity, there will be no childhood or adulthood, but unlike the begining of humanity, it will be because life is too easy, not because life is too hard.
I dont think people realize what a big deal puberty blockers and hrt are. Like, we literally discovered the secret to eternal youth and people are to busy using it as a buzzword to argue about trans people. Puberty blockers go deeper than just if little samantha wants to become little sam. This shit is literally able to keep you in a permanent state of prepubscence! And hrt can artifcially induce puberty. The implications of this, and what we can use these drugs for, is literally fucking crazy and borderline playing god, yet we are too busy whining about transgenders to ignore that a puzzle piece of eternal youth is literally RIGHT THERE and its driving me nuts. Like we can literally artficially stop people from physically aging with puberty blockers and artificially force them to age with hrt, and for some reason, no one fucking cares about the implication for this outside of femboys. Imagine what we can do with more scientific advancements, if we can already artficially age or stop people from aging in the 2020s
Care about puberty blockers and hrt because it literally unlocks part of the puzzle piece for obtaining eternal youth
Care about puberty blockers and hrt because you dont want nonbinary femboys in the womens restroom
